This degree program is administered by a Director of Graduate Studies and a Graduate Studies Committee drawn from faculty in the Department of English, the School of the Arts, and the School of Mass Communications. The program is not limited to one department or discipline within the participating units. Rather, it is designed to break down “disciplinary walls” in order to cultivate the research possibilities available to students, allowing them to fashion new intellectual areas for the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Reflecting this interdisciplinary concept, faculty members from many units and with many different perspectives are participating in this program. While the Ph.D. focuses on New Media, it also retains a historical and theoretical dimension by including study in the production, dissemination, and employment of literary texts, art, and other kinds of texts, and in turn how these texts function within specific settings informed by gender, ethnicity, class, race and other cultural factors. The creation of a Ph.D. that extends its reach to film and New Media, television and advertising, addresses the growing need for the study of virtual and visual texts.

The 42-hour curriculum of the Ph.D. program in Media, Art, and Text is designed to foster an intellectual, creative, and artistic environment in which students from different disciplines can work collaboratively and independently to develop and disseminate knowledge in this emerging field. The program starts with a core curriculum in the first two semesters that provides students with a shared theoretical, methodological, and creative experience, and then enables—indeed requires—them to work independently in their seminars, independent studies, and dissertation project. Designed for students who enter the program with an M.A., M.S., M.A.E., or M.F.A., the program assumes that students have a strong background in one of the participating disciplines. The coursework is designed both to build on their existing strength, and to compel them to work outside their existing strengths in order to develop new intellectual and creative connections within the multiple media, disciplines, and approaches joined in the program. The capstone experience of the first year, a production workshop, is a model of this kind of multi-disciplinary work. All the students in an entering class will work collaboratively to develop a project, and a product (text, theatrical production, art installation, film, web page—some combination of those things) that draws on the shared strengths and fields of knowledge. 

The curriculum includes a set of core and elective courses, seminar experiences, and a strong interdisciplinary research component. It provides significant grounding in the theoretical underpinnings of the fundamental concepts of the program—theories of textuality, history of interdisplinarity—as well as the necessary research methodologies. Both the didactic coursework and the development of research and creative projects have an emphasis on fostering an interdisciplinary approach. The majority of the courses in the first two semesters will be team taught, enabling students to develop an understanding of the expertise of participating faculty but also providing them with clearly delineated approaches to the field.

Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope , Program Director
Thom Didato, Graduate Programs Coordinatorg